Start-Up to Enterprise Localization

Overview

Beyond just keeping up with your company’s growth, how can you meaningfully contribute to that growth while optimizing your localization processes and team?

The rate of growth in startups can be astronomical. As a localization professional, you may need to scale your program and team rapidly.

To do so successfully requires a higher level of awareness and more than the day to day knowledge of localization.

You need to know how to evangelize localization to your company, strategically position your team to make the most impact, demonstrate how your efforts contribute to ROI of the company, and enable its go-to-market strategy.

In this eBook we will give you tips gathered from the localization teams at leading technology start-ups Slack, SurveyMonkey, and Eventbrite and go-to-market strategy insight from Yewser.

Evangelize

Don’t let people forget you exist.

No team should exist in a silo. A first step to breaking out of your box is making sure that other departments know you exist, and not only that, have a good impression of you. Find allies who can help pass along the importance of localization across teams, departments, and at the executive level. In other words, build your ‘sphere of influence’!

Tips for Organization

Take yourself as seriously as other teams do. Have internal service agreements with other teams. Move away from a “service” mentality to an organized structure with road maps and clear definitions of what you do (and do not) do.
Educate yourself on the core objectives, agendas, and goals of other departments. Once you know their goal, you can demonstrate your value and improve relations by stepping up to help them deliver on their global goals.
Link your work to other people’s metrics. Instead of giving siloed results, present your success with statements like, “We’ve achieved ____ together”. People like to share what they have done well and your own achievements will gain public recognition along with theirs.

5 Fun Things to Try

International Monkey. Show appreciation to folks who go out of there way to help your team. For example, at SurveyMonkey they make sure that non-localization employees are recognized when they fix localization problems. For instance if a coder fixes a bug that was affecting international users, they are publicly presented with an “International Monkey” stuffed animal by the localization team. This is a fun and easy way to create goodwill.
Localization Roadshow. Take your team on the road to visit each department. Set up a time with each of the different departments in the company where you will meet with them and talk about:
- How localization impacts them.
- What projects you have done together in the past.
- How you might be able to contribute to their success going forward.
Bootcamp Add On. Raise visibility by dovetailing onto existing company training initiatives. For example, at Eventbrite, they have a good number of coding bootcamps. The localization team talks with the organizers and arranges a session on localization as part of the training.
Marketing Campaign. If you have a particular initiative that you are working on, an internal marketing campaign can get all departments on board. Send out flyers or emails to raise awareness about what you are doing or hold a lunch and learn event. (and, like they do at Slack, bring your L10N stickers!)
Office Fieldtrip. One thing that LinkedIn has done is to take creative leads, cross functional leads, and other important stakeholders on an actual field trip to one of your in-country offices. You can talk about it all you want but as soon as they experience the practical application of localization it will have a much bigger impact.

Strategic Positioning

Widen your sphere of influence.

If you evangelize right and get the buy in from the right people it does not matter so much where in the org chart your team is listed.

If all departments are aware of localization and their need for it like they would be for any other cross functional initiative (mobile, diversity, etc.) they are more likely to bring you into the discussions that you need to be in.

Sometimes just setting yourself up as a cross-functional department is not enough. You need to actively seek out and be in the meetings where the decisions are made. This will give you knowledge of what the overall goals and objectives of the different groups are.

It will also give you a chance to bring in a localization perspective from the very beginning of any project (product, marketing, etc.).

By getting the people in your company to start thinking about the international side from the get-go you can ward off a multitude of issues down the road.

Budgeting & ROI

How to justify the head count and spending.

Being able to show the numbers and ROI is of course important but even more so is having international growth as a company priority not just a localization department priority.

If international growth is a top priority for your company the individuals in charge know that they need to invest.

Things to Keep in Mind

Monitor your budget, what you did for each department, and how it turned out. One suggestion is to meet regularly with your finance department contact to make sure that everything looks right. Use this as an opportunity to build up that relationship.
The cost of going into a new market is not just a localization cost. Actually, the localization expenses will be pretty small compared to the other department costs that are getting sent in to Finance for the expansion.
The scrutiny from above will likely be more on where you have been able to save money rather than your overall spend. Demonstrate your initiative and ownership of the budget by making sure that you have taken advantage of all the appropriate technology and optimizations on the market.